Dr. Stephen Ondra: Neurosurgeon's career included stop at White House

Despite health law's stumbles, he stands by overhaul he helped craft

For most of October and part of November, Dr. Stephen Ondra couldn't sleep.

The launch of the Affordable Care Act, the national health care overhaul that Ondra played a hand in crafting and implementing, had landed with a thud.

At first, federal officials blamed a crush of consumers for the overloaded capacity and widespread technical problems plaguing the federal website where consumers were supposed to buy new health insurance policies.

But it soon became clear the issues were much deeper and would take much longer to solve.

"It was truly agonizing for me. So agonizing that I was sleepless," Ondra said. "I felt almost personally responsible. I was part of the (Obama) administration. I was a doctor. I spent a decade working toward this, and now I'm watching it fail, and I'm sitting in this office and thinking, 'Oh my God.'"

Ondra, two years removed from a three-year stint working on the health law's medical-record and insurance-plan regulations for President Barack Obama's White House, is now a top executive at the nation's fourth-largest insurer, Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp.

The parent company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois and four other states has staked part of its future on the health care expansion, which was designed to extend insurance to millions of Americans who could not afford coverage or were denied it because of pre-existing health conditions

The 56-year-old, whose credentials include more than a decade as a nationally renowned neurosurgeon who pioneered new procedures, a tenure as a physician leader at Northwestern Memorial HealthCare and his service as a decorated Army physician during the Gulf War, still has much riding on the success of the law.

As the insurer's chief medical officer, Ondra oversees medical policy, care management and pharmacy, as well as health care quality, strategy, communications and health disparity efforts. He also fills another crucial role: one of HCSC's point people on the Affordable Care Act, charged with guiding the insurer through the largest upheaval in the health insurance market in a generation.

Although he makes an attempt to be politically neutral as a corporate officer, his political leanings are no secret.

"I served in the administration, so who am I kidding?" he said. "I fully supported (the president's) agenda. You don't elect to leave at the height of a very prestigious career (in neurosurgery) and completely walk away from that to join an administration if you don't believe in it."

His experience in Washington is part of what makes him so valuable to HCSC.

He brings to the company a global understanding of the health care law and its finer points, as well as personal relationships with an array of government and industry players.

A deft negotiator with a big personality and a resume to match, he is known as genuine and fair with virtually unparalleledcredibility in public policy discussions.

"Steve Ondra is probably on the short list of five or six people in the United States in terms of their access, influence and thought leadership in health care policy," said Peter L. Levin, his former White House colleague and now chief executive of Amida Technology Solutions, an online data privacy and security firm.

Ondra's combination of interpersonal skills and relentlessness in moving an agenda forward gave him a reputation of being able to shepherd disparate parties to get to "yes" on complicated policy issues. In Washington, that meant bringing together government agencies, policymakers and private industry to shape the health law's rules.

His work included helping take the broad mandates of the health care law and refining its requirements for insurers, including the types of health care services they must cover and how health information data must be collected, stored and used by hospitals and doctors.

"My biggest contribution was, I provided grease," Ondra said. "There are all these gears turning, and you've got to figure out how you get all these different forces to row in the same direction."

Standing 6-foot-5 with a full head of white hair, Ondra cuts an imposing figure. But former colleagues describe him as a warm and jovial Everyman "who was enormously facilitating and deferential," with an innate ability to make people feel smarter, Levin said.

"After a super-intense conversation, when the books are closed and the lights are off, even the people who disagreed with him the loudest would ask him, 'What are you doing for dinner?'" Levin said.

Ondra's personality was shaped by his late father, who Ondra said had a deep respect for everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity or gender.

Stephen L. "Steve" Ondra was born in 1957 in Belleville, Ill., the oldest of three boys of Shirley and Duane Ondra.

He was drawn to medicine immediately. One of his earliest memories is reading the biology and human body sections of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, entries he returned to so much that he can still picture the illustrations accompanying them.